A leading tertiary institution in cutting edge contemporary arts and design education and practice, LASALLE offers more than 30 different programmes and is led by a community of award-winning artists, designers, educators and researchers.

With a wide range of programmes in a world-class campus, you can expect an unparalleled arts education that’s designed to nurture your passion for the arts and push the boundaries of creative excellence.

From the performing arts to visual arts, our Schools are at the forefront of the contemporary arts scene in Singapore. Learn more about how each School is shaping the arts scene locally and internationally.

How Does Theatre Think Through Incorporating Media

Prof Steve Dixon

Abstract:

This book chapter investigates the multifarious ways that film, video and digital projections are used in theatrical stage productions, and the vast range of ideas, meanings and effects they create. Case studies of practitioners including Katie Mitchell, Robert Lepage, the Wooster Group and The Builders Association illustrate the myriad ways in which theatre thinks through, investigates and experiments with the potent conjunction of live performance and recorded media....

It proposes a taxonomy of the five most impactful types of effect that theatre directors elicit and employ, from ‘the synesthetic pleasure principle’ and explorations of ‘ghosts and doubles’ to ‘metamorphosing time and space’.

The Introspective Merlion: Transculturalism in Singaporean Animation

Ang Qing Sheng

Abstract:

Singapore celebrated 50 years of independence in 2015. The nation state has been repeatedly criticized as “a cultural desert” by scholars due to the cosmopolitan nature of the society. However, animated short films from Singapore are increasingly engaging national identity and culture as their premise....

This paper explores how transculturation may shape the future of Singapore animated cinema by reflecting upon the creative voices of local animation filmmakers through a case study of seven animated shorts – Curry Fish Head (2013), 1997 (2014), Go Local (2014), The Violin (2015), Pioneers of the Future (2015), The Tiger of 142B (2015) and Lak Boh Ki (2016). The films reveal the effects of transculturation in multicultural Singapore from the perspective of animation filmmakers. Manifestation of Singapore culture is identified by representations of racial diversity; national personification such as the Merlion icon; local scenes such as the Housing Development Board (HDB) apartments; use of Singlish language; historical moments like the separation of Singapore and Malaysia; landmarks like the Marina Bay Sands; local delicacies such as fish head curry; nostalgia in the form of childhood memories in public schools. The emergence of these films can be attributed to both social engineering by the incumbent government through national campaigns as well as the erosion of the hyphenated identity through ground-up initiatives by citizens. The paper concludes that transculturation has led to a possible new wave of animated cinema from Singapore that will further contribute to the formation of a shared identity.

Abstract:

It has been observed that students of the 3D Animation programme at LASALLE College of the Arts tend to produce work that lacks stylistic exploration. This could be due to the conventional approach of the software adopted by students - one that involves texturing (colouring) each object individually before lighting them together in a virtual scene....

When colouring each isolated object without being able to envisage the overall design, students tend to let the software dictate the visual style of their work. Taking inspiration from Woon Lam Ng’s (2016) painting approach, this research proposes that lighting precedes texturing. Students will firstly place objects in the scene and consider compositional elements such as tone and shape in relation to the whole before colouring them. The approach proposed in this paper aims to emphasize the overall picture-plane design so as to encourage conscious experimentation with visual style. 17 students from the final year BA(Hons) Animation Art programme were mentored with the proposed approach over 8 weeks. Still images from the students’ work before and after intervention were qualitatively assessed by different assessors based on a set of criteria. Further data collected from a student questionnaire and a research observation journal helped to verify the student’s intent to explore style. They also revealed challenges of the revised approach – productive efficiency and time constraints. The report concludes with possible areas of improvement to the research method and areas for future research.

Theatre and Eschatological Politics

Abstract:

Representations of the end of the world gain currency in moments of social crisis. But such representations are more often the product of political strategies than of uncontrolled social anxieties....

This chapter refers on early colonial religious drama in Mexico and on the Shi’ite ritual performances of Ta’ziyeh in order to highlight the extent to which theatrical characterisations and representations of the end of times, its agents, the afterlife, and the powers that control them may get weaponised on the grounds of creating a sense of apocalyptic agency. That agency is likely to be sustained by a pretence of political and religious power. As such, it is never quite pure – never absolute. Who are the self-proclaimed owners of the end of times and of the final judgement? How are those ends being enacted and contested (or not) in theatre and performance?

Water is Never Still: Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook's Sculptural and Installation Practice

Dr Clare Elisabeth Veal

Abstract:

This paper examines the early sculptural and installation practices of renowned Thai artist and writer, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (b. 1957). Although most scholarly and curatorial attention has focused on Araya’s moving image works, particularly those that involve corp hope of developing a chronological account of Araya’s artistic development, but is instead an attempt to read her early three-dimensional works through insights gleaned from her later artistic and literary practice....

Specifically, in examining Araya’s work from an inter-medial persp between moving and static bodies. As I argue, when understood in conjunction with the ways in which Araya’s oeuvre simultaneously invites and refuses feminist readings, these works provoke a reconsideration of questions of agency and impotence, and their assumed correspondence between action and inaction.

Gender in Southeast Asian Art Histories

Dr Clare Elisabeth Veal

Abstract:

This special issue of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, on the topic of gender and its intersections with art history, emerges and extends from numerous discussions held during the Gender in Southeast Asian Art Histories Nelson, Clare Veal and Stephen H. Whiteman, with invaluable support from numerous staff at the Power Institute and elsewhere in the University of Sydney....

While we were inspired by the symposium in Sydney, this issue is emphatically not a conventional conference proceeding discussed there. Rather, as editors we have taken the Sydney event as one among several points of departure. A number of contributors to this special issue were presenters in Sydney and have substantially reworked their research for publication here. Several other contributors challenge or even productively contradict and undermine the conversations that took place during the event.

Kader Attia’s Museum of Emotion Hayward Gallery, London, 2019

Dr Clare Elizabeth Veal

Abstract:

This paper comprises a review of The Museum of Emotion, an exhibition of works by the French-Algerian artist, Kader Attia, which was held at the Hayward Gallery, London, February–May 2019. The show charted Attia’s interdisciplinary practice from the past two decades, which has dealt broadly with transnational histories of colonialism, violence, oppression and dispossession....

As the Museum of Emotion demonstrated, in Attia’s works these histories are not confined to the past. Instead, they continue to resonate through scars and wounds that in their visibility come to denote the simultaneous absence and presence of the violence of their origination. By focusing on one room within this exhibition, this paper draws analogies between the paradoxical status of the scar in Attia’s work and Jacques Derrida’s notion of writing “under erasure.” In doing so, I outline Attia’s exploration of the potentials and limitations of ‘representation’ and its fraught relationship with lived experience. As I argue, by placing his images “under erasure”, Attia performs a double gesture in recognising the inadequacy of representation for those still living with the legacies of colonialism, whilst still maintaining its fundamental promise to offer what Judith Butler calls the possibility of a “livable life”.

Erasure and Abstraction - An Artistic Process

Dr Ian Woo

Abstract:

The paper looks at erasure and abstraction as forms of phenomenological trace in the art works and processes of artists, filmmakers and composers. It begins with Lady Macbeth’s guilt, manifested in the imaginary washing of recurring blood spots, exemplifying the act of erasure and memory within the psychological self....

This is followed by the comparison and analyses of a range of interdisciplinary art works by Idris Khan, Alvin Lucier, Brice Marden, Cy Twombly, Wim Wenders, Yayoi Kusama and Qiu Zhijie, revealing how they manipulate source materials, through acts of removal and corrections, or by methods of intense layering to convey disruptions. The paper proposes erasure as an impossible act of forgetting, but rather one that conceals and reveals directionally complex visual and sonic information within a range of material constructs.